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P: Export images at multiple resolutions in one go

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
October 5, 2011
113 replies
5094 views

I have discovered through experimentation that photos published to Facebook look best at 2048 pixels on the longest side (the maximum it supports) but images measuring 960 pixels on the longest side come a very close second so that's what I export at when Facebook.

I also publish the images on my own website, which uses SmugMug as a backend and is capable of automatically displaying delivering higher resolution photos (than Facebook) to the browser depending on the viewport size, so I export at 1400px resolution to strike a balance between filesize and image quality.

My problem is that it's not currently possible to export these two sets of images at the same time, I have to do them one after each other (because doing them in parallel is MORE than twice as slow due to LR's poor parallelisation of task execution), manually switching between different export resolutions and folders.

Instead, I would like to be able to pick two (or more) resolutions to export at, set (sticky) subfolder names for them (so that they end up in separate folders within the base export folder), and set LR to export all the images in one go. This would save me a huge amount of manual faffing around every time I export, and because LR would only have to fully render each image once (instead of twice as at present) it would dramatically reduce the total time taken to export both sets of images.

I realise that it should be possible to write a plugin to achieve this (and I'm looking into it) but surely exporting a set of images multiple times at varying resolutions is a fairly common use case (e.g. web/client DVD res and print ordering res for wedding photos) and it would therefore be of benefit to a significant proportion of the LR user base to make it worthwhile Adobe implementing it as a native feature?

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john beardsworth

Community Expert

Because it would be a never-ending commitment? There's a limit to what they can promise, and I'm not sure it would help much to say "we hear you" every year that passes by! The others don't, by the way.

FrostyOfTheNorth

Known Participant

I haven't looked. But if Adobe maintains this forum, then why not make it interactive?

john beardsworth

Community Expert

There are many ways of finding out what customers might want, and one can only assume that Adobe think this is a good one. Maybe I've missed something, but do Apple or CaptureOne get feature requests in this way?

FrostyOfTheNorth

Known Participant

Maintaining feature request forums may get messy, but it's key to improving the product. Is there a better alternative?

john beardsworth

Community Expert

Perhaps all of the above and
6) Maintaining a feature request forum is a hostage to fortune?

FrostyOfTheNorth

Known Participant

I think this thread is showing a few things:

1) This feature suggestion is not esoteric or unique. There seem to be many users independently asking for the same thing. (Thus the multiple merged topics.)

2) Users are getting impatient in the face of a wall of silence about this from Adobe. The way of the carrot works best, but when eight years of that doesn't work... there seems to be a boiling point.

3) Surely with the brainpower and resources at Adobe, this is a comparatively simple feature addition that can be implemented elegantly and without complicating the export process for users who don't care about it -- while addressing this productivity impediment for many of us. So many features have been added to LR over the years that I really don't care about -- while this elemental oversight is ignored. When it comes down to it, I think it's fair to say that pretty much anything any of us do in LR doesn't matter until it becomes tangible through the export process. So why not make that export process a priority?

4) It is disconcerting when well-intentioned (hopefully?) folks on the Adobe forums gloss over legitimate concerns, bugs and shortcomings with an overtly partisan "nothing is wrong here + move along" brush off attitude. That's not constructive. We've seen frustration about that in this thread.

5) Perhaps Adobe staff should respond to threads like this, even if just to say "we hear you. We'll take this back to our team." Eight years of silence is -- and I'm sugar coating here -- disappointing.

john beardsworth

Community Expert

Quite a blossoming conspiracy theory, eh?

Maybe read apmadoc's post a few times. It's my educated guess that this feature isn't costly, but AFAIK only one competing product has ever offered it, so relatively-little customer interest may well have been the key. Claiming it's somehow a basic feature and blaming your fellow customers gets us nowhere, entertaining though it may be. And don't overlook his/her middle "What have the Romans ever done for us?" paragraph.

F

FeedbackCommunityMember

Inspiring

And yet another blatant example of ignoring user requests, with the whole "I don't need it, why do you?" attitude:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom_mobile_mutliple_catalog_syncing

This one was nipped in the bud, by a "champion", no less, by saying that "hey, it was always designed this way, so.. let's see who votes for it" Why would anyone bother when they see it being pushed down so rigorously? And that ticket also has just 75 votes.

"no one asked for it, so why build" should not and cannot be applied to no-brainer features like multiple res export.

Then there's this gem here, https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/lightroom_mobile_virtual_copy?topic-reply-lis... with 289 votes (for the vote counters) and the "expert" opinion offered is.. "hire your team, and make the changes yourself, because Adobe deserves your sympathy as they would have to (sob sob) build the whole app from scratch again".

If Apple had rated for people to ask for a smartphone, we would still be punching away SMS messages on button based phone. Adobe is lucky it is being fed with ideas and also workflows for those ideas. But "Adobe and the Justifiers" (cool name for a band, BTW) are more focused on playing whack-a-mole with users who ask for the most basic things as well.

F

FeedbackCommunityMember

Inspiring

Thank you. And it is that kind of talking down based on superficial reasons and Adobesplaining that I’m frustrated with.
Umpteen tangents have been made - oh just 42 votes, perform an advanced search to see which tickets are getting traction, oh let me tell you how software planning works, and oh I’m an experienced user but I found a hack why can’t you also be happy with a hack..

It is sad that I had to paste links to popular tickets to prove the shallowness of these tangents. Anyone who’s had the painful experience of dealing with Adobe support has already been through these forums and has already seen how tickets are replicated then how they are shushed and finally the OP gives up.

While these takedowns happen, Adobe watches merrily from the side, because it’s better to have their users duke it out rather than to have to actually commit to adding something to the pipeline.

M

Moose408

Participant

The 42 votes thing is meaningless. Yes this thread has 42 votes but I found multiple threads all asking for this feature and they had anywhere from 20 votes to 200. Add them all up and it becomes more significant.

It's very clear that Adobe doesn't care about what the customers in these forums want and will come up with their feature list some other way.

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